Opinion on web development platforms

[V3N0M]

I was wondering what you all thought on web development platforms that enable users with no programming knowledge to create websites for example http://www.wix.com . I personally think that a web developer should want to know how all the components work and build websites from scratch component to component. But this has a disadvantage because it takes time and as a beginner seems like too much work also managing is going to take alot of work but if you are like me and you love to know how your software / app / site works wont take as much time mantaining the website. Where as the above mentioned sites are very fast and easy to use and manage. What is your take should one be very good at sites like wix or work hard to build websites from scratch.??? Thank you All for your replies.

[minitauros]

Depends on what you want to achieve. You don't need to reinvent the wheel but building something yourself from scratch gives you important insights, insights that you will probably need if you want to be a web developer.

As soon as you find out how you can make a wheel that works, you can choose to use a wheel that someone else made or that is made by an open source community and even help making that wheel better. Focus on where your qualities lie. No need to do everything from scratch over and over again :).

[jwenting]

clicking together a website using a tool like that is not web development, it's clicking a website together...

[Taywin]

If you are using a tool like wix, you are a web designer. You just know how to use tools in order to express your creativity. You are not developing a website.

The limitation of using tools is that you don't have flexibilities outside what the tools are offering. In other words, if you want to do something outside the box, then you would need to develop it yourself and may not be able to use the tools to do so. Often time, these kind of tools do not allow users to do something outside its capability because doing so could break the tools.

If you want to learn what is going on in the background, you may start learning any web development scripts/languages. You could start with HTML and CSS. They are the basic before you attempt to deal with any other scripts/languages.

Wix and other similar sites are great for those who have no web development skills. Nothing wrong with them. However, don't create sites using wix and then call yourself a web developer. Not even a designer IMO (no offence to designers with that "not even"). As others have mentioned, develop what you have to, leverage pre-made wheels into place where you don't. It's not cheating, it's making the best use of resources to hand. It's time efficient for you and therefore cost effective for the client.

If you say you will source some unique images, it doesn't mean that you are going to draw them from scratch or dust off your old Browning 38mm. You'd probably go to an image repo and buy one. The image will undoubtedly be better than anything you can knock up in MS Paint, just as a framework like Laravel may handle MVC and database abstraction better than you could coding from scratch.

Using third party scripts will not make you a developer either, despite what some (i.e. script kiddies) may claim. You have to be able to inspect the code, understand it and ensure that it's secure. Using a nice script that allows you to do x, y and z is no good if it opens you up to SQL injection.

You want to develop? Learn to fail, fail once more, fail yet again and fail big time. And just when you've failed for the thousandth time, you say, "Sod it, I'm gonna try again".